The present invention relates generally to pallet fabricating systems; and more particularly, it relates to automatic nailing apparatus for forming and nailing together an arrangement of transverse slats and longitudinal stringers.
In the past, pallet fabricating has been conducted in various ways involving the nailing of a plurality of transverse board slats to a plurality of parallel, spaced-apart board stringers. Principally, the procedure followed in pallet fabricating has been to manually position the slats and stringers in the desired arrangement using a jib, whereupon the pieces are nailed together manually using hand-held nailing guns.
Automatic nailing apparatus is also known in the art (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,945,549) for pallet fabricating. However, this apparatus operates in a stitch nailing fashion which curtails severely the throughput attainable by automatic forming and nailing.